Welcome to Axis ProRata, a podcast that takes just 10 minutes to get you smarter on the collision of tech business and politics.

Sponsored by AT&T. I'm Dan Premack. On today's show, how Toys R Us could impact the next presidential race and the biggest secret behind Amazon search for second headquarters.

The first, Shadows and banning them, and Twitter.

Last week, House Republicans took steps to invite Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey to come testify on Capitol Hill

over allegations that the social media platform has engaged in something called shadow banning.

So, in short, the allegation is that Twitter is limiting the reach of some

conservative accounts, not by actually banning the accounts, which Twitter is known to do in some

cases, but by minimizing their prominence, for example, by not displaying them in its search box.

So while you can still tweet as much MAGA as you want, not as many people will necessarily

see it. Now, Twitter denies that any of this has to do with political bias and instead says it's related to an algorithm that's designed to discourage the sharing of misinformation, kind of a moderating algorithm, and that some conservative accounts got unfairly caught up in it, not due to what they tweeted necessarily, but by the actions of those who interacted with those tweets.

So, for example, if I were to tweet about the Red Sox beating the Yankees four straight,

and it's suddenly retweeted by 100 pro-Trump bots or by Info War diehards, I could have a problem.

So Republicans basically want Twitter to explain itself and maybe give themselves a do-over

from when they displayed so little tech savvy during this past spring's Facebook hearings. Why it matters beyond Twitter stock price is that social media presents itself

as this new national commons, where all of us gather to share information and ideally debate

ideas, or at least yell ideas. But if half the country becomes convinced that the commons are

tilted, then it might as well

just become the online version of cable news, and no one wants that. In 30 seconds, we'll go deeper on

this with Axios tech reporter David McCabe, who broke news of the request for Dorsey last week.

But first, this from AT&T. Picture this. You're the CEO of a multinational corporation, and you realize that nearly half of your 254,000 employees, many of whom are your friends and neighbors, have jobs that will be obsolete by 2020.

That's exactly what happened at AT&T a few years ago, and it's what inspired them to find a way forward with the biggest job reskilling investment in modern American history.

Future Ready is AT&T's $1 billion web-based learning initiative designed to teach existing employees the skills necessary to compete in a software-driven world.

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